Monday, October 8, 2018

US officials have frozen the US assets of the curious Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, The New York Post reports, including his sprawling mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Deripaska bought the East Side property for $42.5 million in 2008, property records show.

FBI agents tried unsuccessfully to flip Deripaska in exchange for information on Russian organized crime — and Russia’s aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, the New York Times reported last month.

Deripaska previously had worked on a “thwarted effort” to rescue an FBI agent who had been captured in Iran, the Times reported.

But get this, according to the Post:

[A]lthough the US government has frozen Deripaska’s US assets, including his property, Deripaska has arranged to have the children and ex-wife of his business partner, the oligarch Roman Abramovich, live within its secure walls, The Post has learned.

According to Treasury officials, when the government freezes assets, that means anyone who does business with a sanctioned person, and sanctioned companies, could be subject to sanctions themselves.

Abramovich recently transferred $92 million worth of property to his ex-wife, Dasha Zhukova, an editor and patron of the arts who listed her current address as 11 E. 64th St., according to property records.

One of Zhukova’s good friends is Ivanka Trump. The two are so close that Zhukova and Abramovich often traveled and socialized with Trump and her husband, presidential son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner, all over the world — from jet-setting hot spots in Russia and Croatia to Aspen and New York.

1 comment:

How is the US government exerting this power any different from the political risks often cited with respect to investing in emerging markets, where investors worry about governments nationalizing, seizing, or freezing assets? The political risk of investing in the US is rising, as the US government gets more easily upset about people not bending to its edicts.